So you want to stay in Google’s good graces? Here are a few tips on what to do – and not to do.
Hope that everyone enjoys their weekend – and take a look at Viral Content Buzz too!
Happy September! Have you guys been keeping track of what’s going on in the SEOsphere without me? Well, no mind, I’m back. 
There’s been a lot of chatter about restricted SERPs and reverse domain crowding, but what are you seeing in search results this month that is making you reactive? There’s been a lot of that lately….
Anyway – here are a few things that have come to our attention recently here at MySEOCommunity.
I’m itching to hear what’s on your mind. How is SEO treating you these days?
It seems the heat got the better of me last weekend, and for that I apologize. But I’m back! Let’ get going on what’s been happening this past week in the SEO-verse.
submitted by Gerald
So another round of link warnings went out in Webmaster Central late this week. But then Matt Cutts said that we could ignore those and if we were really penalized webmasters would see a drop in traffic. Danny Sullivan puts his response together here.
Google’s war on bad links officially became insane today. For months, Google’s sending out warnings about bad links and telling publishers they should act on those, lest they get penalized. Today, Google said the latest round of warnings sent out this week can be safely ignored. That’s not “more transparency” as Google posted. That’s more confusion.
submitted by Gerald
While this may be a short article, and more of a screen shot than anything, it’s worth checking out – makes some very salient points about how to run social media accounts of big companies that I won’t spoil with a quote here.
submitted by Gerald
Written by our very own Ann Smarty (on Mashable!) This is a compilation of the best of the best tutorials on how to get around various social media sites and, of course, social media manners.
Getting around a social media site is not always easy. For some users, it’s a matter of getting used to social media. For others, the issue is keeping up with constant updates and changes to features, privacy settings, and account specifications. This, of course, is why social media cheat sheets exist.
submitted by Gerald
This funny YouTube video uses the funny cartoon characters to illustrate just how dumb you sound when you use templated email pitched to blog owners. Check it out.
Now get out and enjoy your weekend!
So for those of you that are in the States, this has been a very weird week indeed – the 4th of July was on a Wednesday! Do you celebrate before, or after, or just the entire week?
For those of you that are celebrating this weekend, I’ll be brief. My favorite article from this week was submitted by Julie Joyce, and was Two Important Little Things That You Can’t Overlook in Relationship Building. The tips are far from “little” and are quite important when it comes to moving from vendor to consultant or linkbuilder to relationship builder.
A few other things that have happened in the SEOsphere:
And on that, everyone have a great holiday weekend – or if it’s not a holiday weekend, just enjoy the weekend!
submitted by Gerald
You would think that verifying with Google that you’re the author of the content that has your byline would be, well…easy. But it can be more convoluted and tricky than you might have thought, depending on a lot of factors – like if your site is in HTML 5, for instance. And it can be even more tricky if you’re just a contributor and don’t have direct access to the backend. (At that point, actually, it’s pretty much impossible). But this article from Search Engine Land goes through 3 different scenarios to get your articles verified as written by you – all so you can see yourself (literally) in the SERPs.
If you’ve heard about Google authorship markup, but have been confused as to how to get started with it, you are definitely not alone. I’ve been writing about this topic since August of 2011, and have worked to get this process up and running on three separate blog sites (Search Engine Land, Internet Marketing Ninjas, and The SEO Ace– all coincidently, sites that publish my content!).
I’ve learned a few things along the way, right and wrong, but I’ve gotten it properly set up and now my goofy mug usually graces the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) when you search for content I’ve written.
submitted by JulieJoyce
Want to know what some of the top SEO’s in the industry think about the state of linkbuilding? Look no further. We’ve got Rand, Aaron Wall, our very own Julie Joyce and a few more experts in a panel answering some tough questions about the state of the industry. See what they have to say! (They picked out the questions themselves).
First, we get higher quality questions. Secondly, there is no “head nodding” because no one knows how anyone else answered the questions. Each question gets an answer with no outside influence regarding “what the rest of the panel thinks” so to speak. We’ve all been doing this a long time, but that doesn’t mean we always agree or don’t have different methods of achieving the same results.
submitted by amandaecking
Think that you can’t create great content for your website because nobody is going to care about how you make awesome bricks? Or the fact that you produce quality scissors? Well, you’re wrong. People will care – but you will have to work harder to find the right angle, enthusiasm and tone. This article goes through a bunch of “boring” industries with examples of how companies are doing it all right.
Actually I don’t think that there’s such a thing as a ‘boring’ niche, but I do understand where they’re coming from. It’s definitely the case that coming up with ideas for great content is tougher in some than others – but there are companies out there doing it already. As such I wanted to put together this post highlighting some companies who are already doing great things in tough markets. Undoubtedly some of them you’ll have seen or heard of before, but I’ve deliberately tried to come up with some other examples that hopefully you won’t already have heard of.
A few other articles you may want to take a look at today:
Enjoy your weekend, everyone!
submitted by Gerald
We’ve all heard of Ann Smarty, and how she is the Queen of guest posting. Here she gives an interview about her history with guest posting, where she thinks the benefits and pitfalls are, her experience running My Blog Guest, as well as much more.
Plenty of people are guest blogging now. But there’s no competition. Guest blogging is very individual. I am never afraid of revealing my most efficient guest blogging tactics because I know that no matter how many people follow my advice, I’ll still remain unique. My style is unique. I love every article I write. I am passionate about my guest blogging. Other people are great as well. But I won’t ever try to replicate what they are doing because I value my own blogging style.
submitted by shellshockuk
I think we all have a love/hate relationship with link building – and much of that “hate” comes from the amount of time it takes to do. But this article goes through tools and tricks to help you free up at least some of your time. (But what would you be doing otherwise, anyway?)
If something is scalable, its size can be changed, like fonts. How long you have to link build for to get results will never change. It will always be one of the most time-consuming and arguably hardest things you do. If it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong.
Still, there are a lot of things you can do to improve your efficiency and productivity. Below are just some of my favorite, but fair warning: They’re not going to free up all of your time. They’ll just allow you do to more in the time you have.
submitted by christinag
Looking to get a more technical and thorough understanding of how Google sees social in this post-Penguin world? Take a gander at this post from SEOmoz for one man’s opinion and analysis of how the social element affects at least the initial rankings of blog posts in particular.
The data from my research suggests that you get a good exposure for about a week and then you start losing your rankings. If your article is good, this will be enough time for people to start linking to you. Google will then pick up those links and add some important ranking signals to your article.
Unfortunately, that means there is still no long term ranking without some good authoritative links. So let’s find out what kind of impact do authoritative links have on rankings.
But, well, that’s all folks. It’s only three this week, but for a good number of other interesting and relevant SEO news items, head over to My SEO Community and sign up (and you can let us know what you think is important) – but here are a few other articles that I was eyeing this week -
Happy reading!
I was out of the country – but I’m back! Kind of a mixed bag, that. But it’s great news for you guys, cause you get my input again on what’s been up in the SEO world this week. A lot of people are still reeling from flightless birds and trying to figure out how to move forward from here – and the conference season is upon us – which means we get to overanalyze and parse out every word out of any Googler’s mouth, especially if it’s Matt Cutts.
Here’s what I’ve found enlightening this week:
submitted by God
Google Places isn’t going to be Google Places anymore. Really. Just as the knowledge graph is rolling out, Google is finding more ways for users to “engage” with Google Plus. (Can you tell I’m a little bitter about G+?) Google Place is actually rolling out to a local specific tab for business pages in Google Plus.
Business owners will probably have a somewhat more difficult transition than consumers, as they’re compelled now to pay attention to Google+ — in a big way. They now ignore Google+ at their own peril.
So, business owners, brace yourself for a potentially painful transition to Google+, if you don’t have a page on the social network already.
submitted by morganbarnhart
Mogan always seems to have some pretty good social media advice up her sleeve, and she’s back this week with some tips on how not to completely drown in a sea of tweets. For many business owners (or even just people looking to get their name out there) social media can be an all-consuming beast – I know, because I don’t really spend any time on social media just for that reason. The tips laid out here can help put things in perspective and give you a benchmark for how much time you should be dedicating. One of my favorite pieces of advice (that I wish more people would follow):
There are a lot of shiny new platforms that pop up every single day asking you to join because it’s the hot new thing. DON’T DO IT. Contrary to popular belief you DO NOT want to be everywhere. You want to be easily accessible in a few places so that you don’t overwhelm yourself for managing so many places and so you don’t overwhelm your audience for having to find you so many places.
submitted by God
Straight from the horses mouth – we hear from Matt Cutts that footer links for SEO purposes are pretty successfully ignored by Googlebot:
“We’ve done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we’ve been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we’re turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money.”
submitted by God
Julie Joyce is not only a mod here on My SEO Community, but she’s one of the foremost authorities on link building. So when she gives her opinion on what kind of link building to do after Penguin, you sit up and listen.
How do I get any links? Social media promotion of your site, sending content to bloggers and webmasters, asking for links, guest posting…there are tons of ways and I’d say figure out what works for you.
As IT people a lot of us aren’t fans of picking up the phone, but if you like to actually speak to someone, the phone’s a great way to get a link. Actually at my company when we have a webmaster ask to speak on the phone, we almost always get that link.
How do I find good sources to pursue? Good old-fashioned manual discovery works for me, but there are countless ways to do this. There are tools that generate search queries to use (my favorite is Solo SEO’s Link Search Tool) or you can enter some keywords into the search engine of your choice.
Can I really just ask a webmaster for a link? Yes you can. You can be turned down of course, but if you have a great resource to point a webmaster to, you can definitely ask. People ask for links without offering any value all the time anyway.
So…get started! Don’t be afraid to mix medium and get involved in other aspects of your client’s business.
submitted by brickmarketing
Most of us who own websites have gotten emails like the one that is given as an example in this article. But if you haven’t seen one – well, here’s an example! This article is useful as a template for what to tell a lesser-internet-savvy customer who receives one of these emails why it’s spam, and why this person is completely wrong to say that their site isn’t indexed, or has no links, or doesn’t have any social media profiles. I actually ran into this with a client myself, once – I was pretty amazed that they actually opened it and took it seriously. Goes to show you!
Hi
I recently visited your website during a routine survey of sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Efficient SEO brings an increase in online sales or leads. I hope this information may be of use to you, if not then I apologies for any inconvenience caused.So, here’s a summary of my findings on your site:
– Your Google Page rank is 0/10
– You have 0/10 back-links
– Your website has 0/15 pages indexed
Keep an eye out for these, and mark them as spam right away! (If they don’t already immediately go in with you Viagra and pyramid scheme emails.
Enjoy your weekend, all! Good to be back…for the most part.
The weather is starting to get nice again – at least where I am, I don’t know about you – but this just makes me want to get outside and enjoy the weather. I’ll do my best to be quick, but sometimes SEO and search gets the better of me, and I get uber-excited. It’s the search dork in me, I guess.
submitted by thegman
Have you ever wanted to get into Matt Cutt’s head and understand how Google search actually works? Well, this Youtube video provides a peek into what it’s like to be Google’s search engine.
submitted by thegman
This is an absolutely extensive (and exhaustive) guide put together by Ann Smarty on the Social Media Examiner that goes through step-by-step what you need to do to have a successful Twitter chat – and this includes checking your #hashtag idea in Urban Dictionary to see if it has some not-so-nice connotations.
There’s no “right” answer on how to set up your Twitter chat. There’s no “best” time of day or frequency. There’s no “correct” format for how you run it. It all comes down to how creative you get and how seriously you want it to succeed.
Like any other long-term social media endeavor we get involved in, hosting and promoting a Twitter chat requires a lot of patience and persistence. Just put lots of time and effort into making it work and it definitely will!
submitted by shellshockuk
Garrett French, who built the Link Prospector, seems to be a bit more social lately, which is great for link builders, because he’s sharing what he knows. Which is awesome. This article is an awesome walkthrough of what kind of process to go through to get relevant data for very specific queries. In short, change stuff up. And just keep searching.
As a link prospector I find this to be the core problem of using Google for prospect sourcing – the relevance of my prospects diminishes significantly after the top 10-20 results… And going beyond the top 20 results increases time spent qualifying without justifiable returns.
submitted by morganbarnhart
If you’re just starting your blog in WordPress and staring blanking at the page and pages and pages of plugins that you can install, this is a good start. Morgan gives a great run through of plugins that run the gammut from SEO to custom contact forms.
The plugins I’m about to recommend are the top 12 that I put on EVERY WordPress blog that I create because they are the essential plugins to get your WordPress functional. There are other plugins that are specific to genre’s or depending on what you’re trying to do with your website, but these are just the basics.
The best part about these plugins are, they’re all free.
submitted by amabaie
Blog commenting? That’s dead, isn’t it?
Nope. Spam is dead, and always will be, but legitimate blog commenting can be a great way to build relationships – and Marcus comes at this more from the angle of the blog owner than the commenter. Be that blog owner on the web that actually comments on their own blog, and interacts with your readers; it’s a great thing to see and be a part of.
This article isn’t about “How to get more blog comments,” but rather how to cultivate better relationships through comments. Notwithstanding, the two do overlap, as you’ll see in the following list.
But what do you guys think – what have you been eyeballing or focusing on this week in the SEO world?
Now, shoo, go! Have a lovely weekend.
Wow, it seems like people took a late spring break this past week! Which I find surprising…because of (dun dun dun) Google Penguin. Or people have just been too busy dealing with the fallout to use their computers for anything other than work. Probably the latter.
But for those of you that have been living under a rock for the past two weeks-ish, here are some of the more recent thoughts on Penguin:
Who else out there has some actionable Penguin advice that they want to share? What resources have you turned to?
A lot of drama has gone done since our last real update of the state of search – Penguin rolled out, and Rand ranked for “snuggie dog bed”, plus a whole lotta drama about the politics of “outing” black hats and negative SEO tactics and if you’re a traitor to the industry if you reveal black hat or negative SEO tactics (even if you’re whitehat and don’t use them). Don’t understand the difference between “negative SEO” and black hat SEO? Keep reading.
submitted by thegman
I’m always interested in what Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has to say – and his insightful article on black hat SEO “outing” is thoughtful and presents a good case of the situation, taking into consideration both sides of the equation (that is, the person doing the negative SEO work and the person being affected by the negative SEO work).
When you out someone for shady links, you can’t be certain they were responsible for it. They could have had a falling out with a consultant or business partner or another competitor who wanted to hose them. Or their SEO or webmaster could have been non-transparent with them.
Then you out them & they might be toast.
He calls out the SEO industry for being _____ because we’re calling each other out, and making things easier for Google. Do you agree?
submitted by JulieJoyce
Everyone talks about Google, Google, Google. But we can’t forget about Bing, either, as their marketshare is increasing – it seems to be at about 30% of the market right now. And a number of small businesses find success optimizing for Bing – even over Google.
But how to go about it, and where to find the data? This article over at sem-group.com is a straightforward, step-by-step guide on how to use the Bing keyword research tool. Have at, and don’t forget about the other search engines! Plus, there are a number of benefits to the Bing keyword research tool that Google does not contribute in it’s own research tools.
If learning more about Bing keyword research is something you’ve been considering, now is the perfect time to dive into the deep end. Bing recently announced that their Webmaster Tools is launching an organic research tool that can offer up to six months of historical data. All the data that will be gathered from this keyword research tool will be focused on SEO, not PPC, and there is no rounding or averaging when it comes to results.
submitted by moneytized
A good parallel to the SEO Book article on Negative SEO and outing mentioned first in this list, this article is a friendly reminder to everyone both what the preconceived notions are about SEO – and therefore what a lot of small buisness owners and uneducated CEOs think of when that acronym is bandied about – and thus what you should be avoiding in the field if you want to play by the rules.
This is also a great primer if you’re looking to strike out on your own and start an online business, the author presents a number of efforts both to avoid and situations to take into consideration when moving forward with online marketing.
You’ve read all about it. Working in Internet Marketing and having an online business so you can make money from home is the most promising thing you read about on the Web these days. There’s so much information on how to make it big out there, but what should you believe? What’s genuine, and what’s a scam? What is everyone saying, and how much of it is true?
submitted by amabaie
This article presents interesting insight on the (unexpected) ways in which social media is infiltrating our lives, slowly and steadily. Would you share your medical information online? Would you look up potential doctors on Facebook, or see what people have to say about them through various social means?
A good percentage of the population (esp. those surveyed bet. the ages of 18-24) are likely to. Are you?
A full one-third of U.S. consumers are using YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to find medical information, research and share their symptoms, and offer opinions about doctors, treatments, drugs, and health plans. The trend isn’t new, though it does seem to be growing, with consumer confidence in the information they are finding through social contacts higher for some people than others.
submitted by kissmetrics
Have you ever considered your website design and user interface as a part of your SEO strategy?
The TL;DR of this is – Yes. But appearing credible is most important. Declutter, allow users to compare products, don’t have too much white space, and HOLY CRAP DON’T USE F%!&*#& POPUPS. Oh, and write good and test usability. Really test. Don’t just “go on a gut feeling.”
Companies invest thousands of dollars when they want to redesign their website, hoping that a more attractive design will lead to more revenue. But does it really matter? Is simplicity more important than eloquent design? Where do you draw the line between simplicity and overkill? What really matters to users? While the ‘wow factor’ may leave a positive impression on investors, banks and even prospects, does it lead to more sales?
So enjoy your weekend, and I’d love to hear – what have you been talking about in the SEO industry this week?
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